Can honesty survive in a corrupt parliament?

Abstract

In this work, we study a simple model of social contagion that aims to represent the dynamics of social influences among politicians in an artificial corrupt parliament. We consider an agent-based model with three distinct types of artificial individuals (deputies), namely honest deputies, corrupt deputies and inflexible corrupt deputies. These last agents are committed to corruption, and they never change their state. The other two classes of agents are susceptible deputies, that can change state due to social pressure of other agents. We analyze the dynamic and stationary properties of the model as functions of the frozen density of inflexible corrupt individuals and two other parameters related to the strength of the social influences. We show that the honest individuals can disappear in the steady state, and such disappearance is related to an active-absorbing nonequilibrium phase transition that appears to be in the directed percolation universality class. We also determine the conditions leading to the survival of honesty in the long-time evolution of the system, and the regions of parameters for which the honest deputies can be the either the majority or the minority in the artificial parliament.